are author, travis readers,

first foray into storytelling was his own journey with opioids after a motorcycle accident in 2015. his first book, in pain, explores the ethical and policy raised by pain. pain, opioids, addiction and north america's drug overdose crisis. his ted talk titled the agony of opioid withdrawal, has a very similar viewing to this presentation in about 2.8 million views, catastrophe ethics begins the inevitable destruction of the earth from

climate change presents hypotheticals using, both incestuous and non incestuous sex as the virtue of throwing one person off a bridge to save many more shames people for reproducing and even quotes the big lebowski. so you could say this book really tied the room together. and if you have no idea what talking about by the book friends is bioethicist and moral philosopher the johns hopkins berman berman institute of bioethics. he's a husband, a father, an avid rock climber. so without further delay, please welcome travis rieder. yeah. so do you know how.

to dig into this? yeah. all right. looks like i'm doing this thing from here. now that was, in fact, the most groan worthy introduction that i've ever had. thank you very much, sir. thank you all for coming today to a very uplifting sounding talk called catastrophe ethics. i assure you, it will be exactly as uplifting as you imagine it is going to be. so i, a moral philosopher, i'm a bioethicist. those are my day jobs. i also like to write for the general public because it seems strange to think that you're talking and thinking about something important and then never say it to basically anyone other than the 30 undergraduates who are forced to sign up for your class. so i going to ask you, but if i'm stuck back here, i can't see my slide deck. this is going to be awkward. i will see how we go so i'm

going to i'm going to give you like a really high level introduction into a few thoughts in my book. i am happy to talk about this for as long as you want to talk about it. so let's chat more afterwards. but here goes the talk. oh, i can see you on the computer. this is serious. okay, good. the talk like the book begins with milk, which obviously we write several. years ago i had switched from milk to almond for my breakfast and i did this because i'm virtuous. obviously, i had learned that cow milk was very environmentally expensive because you're getting it from cows. they are very environmentally expensive. and so i switched to well, first the soy milk and didn't agree with me very much and i tried almond milk and all the milk is fantastic i absolutely loved it. and then i started doing a food nutrition policy project, my colleagues at hopkins and i learned something very, very distressing, which is that a single almond nut requires about

12 liters of water to grow and the vast majority, all almonds consumed in the world, are grown in california, which famously has lots of water. so then i felt pretty about my almond milk consumption. i traded high carbon footprint for a high water footprint, and so i tried oat milk, which i thought was disgusting. i'm not going to be sponsored them anytime soon. i'm good, thanks. so i talked to my my model or friends who are working on this nutrition project and kind of said, look, all based milks are better than dairy milk along various metrics and none of them are perfect. you're going to fail a lot. like just pick and go with it. that's the invariance satisfying, but that's basically been my practice. so going back to electric cars, i too am virtuous like. scott and so i drive an electric car. this felt really good as a decision to do because we cannot bring about the world that we

have to to fight climate change without almost universal abandonment of internal combustion engines. we have to entirely transfer over to electric vehicles and transport. they're going to be things that are very hard like flying. and so the private industry is going to have to be electric. so i buy an electric car felt really good about buying into that industry, but i charge it at home and my electricity pulled from the grid which my home maryland is largely pulling from natural gas. so this free right so i started thinking why obviously better for solar panels on my home that i can charge my car with the sun and it sounded really good. and so last year i finally serious about this and i got a of quotes and it turns out that the charge that my partner and i both electric cars we have a really high electric usage in our house so they charge all of our electric needs for a year we needed to spend about $65,000 on solar panels.

now, if you hear a lot about the revolution going at mark speed, it's like the technological green revolution is mind blowingly fast. those of us who have been studying this for a long time, if you asked us years ago if we would be anywhere close to where we are we would have said absolutely not. we were very pessimistic. so it really is amazing. but $65,000 is not within reach of most people. right. this not something that can be solved by individual. and i think about food all the time because we eat all the things i eat all the time. and so i have lots of thoughts about food over my life. i've been vegetarian. i've never been vegan, but boy, have i tried. i've been flex italian, i've been pescatarian, and the pull is always the same whether it's for environmental reasons or for animal welfare reasons, it feels like i could be contributing to lots bad things and and so i should do less right. but that's really demanding because i eat a lot and you have to make this choice all the time and i also very often give this by flying somewhere now i'm from

hopkins up the road so i got to drive today my electric car mind but very often i'm this talk at a city that i have flown to talk about climate change and this is one of the very worst things that we can do for the environment it's just incredibly energy expensive. and my family and i also fly overseas every year. my in-laws all live cyprus. and so that's a metric ton of carbon, give or take per seat on airplane every year each way. it's really expensive. but, you know that's actually not the worst thing that i've done environmentally it's my i'm just curious do any of you have a guess like what my worst environmental sin is like what's the biggest, highest carbon footprint thing i've done? yeah. you have children. i have a baby. i did the. i made this. yeah. i mean, i helped make this my part was really quite small, but i have an adorable daughter and she's worth but she's very

expensive. like environmentally very expensive. she's expensive the other way to. but when you think about having a kid like yes you you buy lots of diapers and you do all of the things you a bigger car and you buy a bigger house and, all of that. so one time or shorter term increases in your carbon, but that's the beginning, right? because she's a person she's to have her own carbon footprint it and then she might have more people and they will have their own carbon footprints and so i think about this to sort of standing on top of an iceberg of future emissions as long as we are net positive emitters, i am continuing to contribute from the grave right. so this starts to feel like the answer can't be to just stop doing all the emitting the food is hard enough. it happens all the time. $65,000 is a lot for solar panels to try to fully withdraw,

but surely we're not going to tell people to stop kids right now? some people do, to be clear, but that is going to be the argument that i here today. and so what this starts to indicate is that when we try withdraw, when we face these various catastrophes, massive structural problems, and we think our solution must be to withdraw from those problems, we're endorsing that i call a purity ethic. the idea is if you act, if you drive a gas guzzler, if you this sort of thing, you are part dissipating in some massive structural collective harm and you could choose not to you could withdraw and so you can keep your hands clean, right? that's the purity ethic. but it so quickly becomes demanding and so overwhelming, especially with my undergrads. i about this and i show them where it and we're going to keep talking about where it leads because is uplifting. so we keep about this and very

quickly my 18 year old students throw up their hands and say i don't know, man, this isn't on me. this is not my problem. and that way there be dragons because that takes us towards nearly ism. we are constantly implicating ourselves in of these massive structural problems. and so if you think that just because your part is so small, it can't be on you because policymakers are the ones you really ought to be doing it. or the top 100 companies are responsible for like 80 or 90% of emissions in the world. it must be on them, not me. if you really. it's not my problem, then a whole bunch of. what we do in our lives just doesn't matter all and that's moral. there's nothing better or worse about doing one thing over the other. so this is the puzzle. the that led me to start thinking about this many many years ago the puzzle that led to me writing this book is i think

it's the most reasonable thing in the world for a morally sensitive person to feel themselves implicated in massive harms and say, i shouldn't part of this. and yet a quick lee becomes unwieldy and i'm going to suggest to actually withdraw yourself and so we're stuck in this situation where it feels like my individual actions are just too small to matter, but it kind feels like i should engage in them anyway. and that's the puzzle puzzle of ethics. have you ever thought of this before? has this ever occurred to you? you're at this talk. the answer is probably yes. okay. so i'm used to a screen being behind me. i'm like, guy. no, he's not really. he's over there. this handsome fellow, his name name's walter sanford armstrong. he is a philosopher at unc-chapel hill. and 20 years ago now published quite a famous paper like philosophy. you know, called it's not my fault. and the argument was that although it seems many people,

including to him, that we are morally obligated not to do really bad, like drive a gas guzzler. so here's the example i came up with said, think of the worst car you can imagine, the least efficient car you can imagine. now think of this hobby of just driving it around to no in particular it's probably talking about that car so that activity he calls joy gosling and on his a joy guzzle emits something like 14 kilograms of co2 now doesn't really hard to understand like what that means we're going to come back to that but he's like look that's feels like 14 kilograms of co2 you did not need to emit so you shouldn't it like you have a duty not to joy guzzle. but here's the thing carbon cycle is incredibly complex in our atmosphere is absolutely massive so we can talk about this more because some people really want to like down on the mathematical weeds here but the

basic idea i mean this is a slight update to his argument 20 years ago. but the basic idea is the all anthropogenic carbon, which is to say the amount of carbon that we can put out into the atmosphere and maintain a not terrible earth climate system. so the number of people are using for a long time is not warm the planet by two degrees celsius typically. ah that's terrible. like that's, that's a line we never should have thought about crossing. but if we want to limit it to two degrees warming, we can burn a trillion metric tons of carbon which is 3.7 trillion million metric tons co2. so the joy guzzle is 14 kilograms. this is not around error. this is not a drop in the bucket. this is a drop in an ocean in ocean is not static. it is incredibly and it's moving around. look at the picture of the carbon cycle you're emitting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. it is getting up into the ocean, which is the big carbon sink or

swamplands or peat moss or whatever and the little bit of it stays in the atmosphere and some of it's there for a few years and some of us there for 10,000 years. and then that's not what causes the harm, right? the harm of climate change is the heat waves and the drought and the hurricanes and the mudslides and the famine and the wars that we fight. diminished resources. and that is not related in a straightforward way, to the molecules that we're into the atmosphere. so this is incredibly complex chain of events that takes us to eventually. 8 billion people emitting causes through things like resource wars and mudslides and hurricanes and fires i forgot fires, fire seasons coming again. right? so that's system is so big and so complex. it is here. that really important language in sensitive to individual choice. so walter saying armstrong says years ago it feels like obligated not to join us all because you hurt people in change hurts people, but you don't hurt people when you join

us all and he says it's not my fault. now he's not happy about this, right? he's not like. joy goes all the way. his point is that this is kind of a puzzle right. he can't understand how could justify how we are obligated do something when it doesn't matter. what i'm going to argue next is that the puzzle isn't actually just about climate change. so that's where it got famous. but one of the things i wanted to do in my book is to say, if you're sort of worried about this if it feels like you should do something, but your actions are so tiny, you don't what they could do. we're in so much more trouble than just thinking about climate change, right? because this is ethics. any vegetarian is vegans, any any restricted choice. people in the audience. if you mean an ethics and an ethics talks, i've always got to get a few of them here. right a lot of people who are vegetarians, vegans, etc. the idea i don't want to i don't want to hurt animals or animals are incredibly environmentally expensive. it's not hard to see why, right?

because we could just eat plants, but instead we grow plants to feed them to a really inefficient machine as they grow. and then we eat the machine. so it's like a really inefficient source of calories. so people like, i don't want to hurt animals and don't want to hurt the planet, but walter said it. armstrong was right. the scale of these choices to us, insensitive to individual choice the animal agriculture system is a lot like the climate system. it's not the same but massive and complex and tyson chicken doesn't notice if i choose not to buy a chicken breast right it's just too big this also this is a snippet from the new york times on how to be a conscious consumer. even if you're on a budget and. i just love this title because it's making clear that a whole bunch people are worried about this. like, it's important to me that. i don't support bad companies right and i get this because i was raised to with my dollar right? when you buy something, you're

rewarding a company your business and so if you find their terrible stock doing that right and the example that i was used to this just so precise is if you find out if you're a chocolate lover and you find out that your chocolate brand utilizes slave labor somewhere in the supply chain, kind of feels like you should stop buying that chocolate bar right. it's like you don't need it and you could just opt you could choose not to support that. but now you're on hook for not supporting a lot of things. right? so we're going to come back to that. here's the way in which i want to make it clear that you really can't opt out. so there might be some people in the audience who are like everything you've said so far, i can opt out. i can opt out of inhumane farming practices. i go off the grid, i can minimize my energy consumption. i can really out here's here's

the show you that it's borderline impossible today. so the graph here is about projected use of projected use for lithium ion batteries. so one of the main lithium ion sources we have requires cobalt. so if you look at the names of all these different batteries, more than half of them have cobalt in the name. right. so a book bunch of burke book nerds here write a book that i highly recommend. that was really influential to me as i was thinking about this is book cobalt read by siddharth kara, who took this picture and. he took this picture because this is where cobalt. from 80% or so of the cobalt we use is mine in the democratic republic of congo. very often, in situations like this. so this picture here is of an open mine. it's incredibly dangerous yes, there are caverns all the time, morbidity, high mortality. and so what kara argues over the course of this book is that the situation in this in these places is so dire that this form

of mining that's called artisanal mining is like the worst euphemism ever, where you just pay pennies per pound or a kilo of cobalt two people to go out pickax in this rock, you end up paying them a dollar two a day. and these really dangerous conditions they have no other options. and so carter says this modern day slavery and i trust him because siddharth kara is literally an expert on modern day slavery. that's what all his research is on. and what this means is everything that we use as rechargeable in our life. the phones the laptops, the battery in our electric cars. that's a big battery, right? it's stuffed full of cobalt. and it probably came from the congo, which means all of us in this room are, in fact, participate in a system of modern day slavery. i told you, this is going be a really uplifting talk. all right.

so was really hoping that kara would tell us how to out of this. and one of the things he makes clear, i'm not going to tell you to stop buying your phones and computers, that's not helpful advice. and so he does the thing that so many people does when we're talking about climate change and these other problems as they like. it has to be a policy. we have to address the sorts, mining regulations and, the way we get our cobalt out of the ground because you not updating your iphone soon next time isn't going to save anyone from these mining conditions. all right. okay. so i have to go really fast to give anything like an indication of what i do in the book. and so i'm going to give you just what's like it's like a speed dating version of book. and then we can we can chat about it. and so here's my diagnosis of the puzzle. remember, the puzzle is this, this problem that walter sand armstrong gave us that it feels like we're obligated to withdraw from these bad practices. but when you withdraw, you're

not actually making a difference. if you're not making a difference, why do we think you're obligated. and then you add to that to the fact that now i've told you, this puzzle is everywhere air, which means there's so many things that you would have to do to be a decent person if you required to withdraw from all these bad practices. so here's my diagnosis, it's not a treatment plan yet, but my diagnosis for problem, i think we're obsessed with duty, obligation. and so this is a little bit nerdy because i'm a philosopher sorry you were warned, right. so we say things all the time and. i was keyed into this because i read the philosophy or is working on this and they're all like walter stuart armstrong. they're all like, do you have a duty not to joy gosal and then they can't prove it because it doesn't cause any harm. it doesn't have any meaningful. but then i started talking to non philosophers too, like normal people, right? and everybody wants to say like no, you're wrong. like if you, you know, if you update your phone the second you

need one and you're participating in cobalt mining practice when you absolutely don't need to because your phone is fine and like that's wrong, you're doing the wrong thing, you're violating your duty. i had a student who, like, totally called me alex offered to buy her starbucks before class because buy one, get one free and there's a starbucks right across from my. and so i'm like, hey, i'm picking my orders. buy one, get free. is there anything you i and and like very justifiably said no i don't support union busters. i would we were going over so i could teach her ethics. right. that was that was the context here. and so the judgment is sharp, right. because it does feel like if a company is union busting and union busting is real bad, then maybe you shouldn't support, but maybe you shouldn't. them is a lot weaker than the judgment i felt, which is doing

the wrong thing here, buddy so duty and obligation are our favorites because if i can show that you're violating your obligation, i, i'm like standing in authority over like moral authority over you. and you think about our polarized society and the we talk about each other. we think the other side on every issue is it's not that like maybe they should consider not doing that thing. they're wrong. so i think we're obsessed with duty and, obligation and. i think maybe we should cool it a little bit because we have more tools available. so here's my spectrum of. should ines and i that language to my dear friend kelly here, who is a philosopher who left academia because she's smarter than me. and she read a manuscript my book and was trying help me think through like yeah there's softer concepts duty right so of course there are there's a spectrum of shooting is there spectrum of ordinal s although that one's worse.

so i want the spectrum of shadiness. and on one end there's duty and, obligation. these are the heavy of morality. they let you stand in authority over someone. if someone violates their duty, you get to blame and shame them. you get to call them out. you make them feel it's righteous, man. it feels great, but it's not the only tool that we have in our toolbox. so all the way on the other end, i want to go. someone else i know my reasons not like duty and obligation, like reasons. you've got reasons to do stuff too. okay, so my favorite example of how i think about the difference between reasons and duty. i was driving home with my daughter and she said, now we were turning in my neighborhood off a very busy road and there was large, clearly like mature, very, very slow, still turtle crossing this busy road. and my daughter's like, daddy, daddy, you have to save the turtle. it's not going to make.

i was like, oh, god, i'm definitely about to out into traffic to save a turtle. ani. and here's the thing so i'm thinking about i pull over in our neighborhood, look back and that turtle is going to die. people go like 55 on this road. so like, okay, stay here and i get out and i'm like flagging down people making myself as big as possible, like pointing like, hold on, i'm walking in traffic, just chill. and i grabbed the turtle and i walked like 100 yards into the weeds and pointed in the opposite direction. and, you know, it probably went back in the road next day, but i went back to my car and i was here. and for me and we save the turtle. here's here's the reason i told you that story. i mean, because virtuous, but i don't think anyone has a duty to rescue wild animals. if we do we are in serious trouble. there are a trillion in wild

animals made that number up, but there are a trillion wild animals in of rescue right now. and it's worse than that. right. because when the lions hunting the gazelle do, we rescued the gazelle from the lion or do we rescue the lion from hunger? so we have obligations to, rescue wild animals. we're in serious trouble. i don't think we have them. i do think there are good reasons to rescue the turtle. here's a good reason. i would have been smashed in suffering, died, and a living creature that sucks. it is objectively bad making for a living creature to suffer and die. so that's a reason to save it. also, my daughter was watching as she loves turtles. so good moral reason feel like it's good to model compassion for my daughter. less moral, but still a reason i like look good in front of my daughter and be her hero. right? so we have different reasons. and what these reasons are is they're just considerations that count in favor of doing something. they're lightweight too, believe it or not, that's actually like philosophy, jargon, reasons are

considerations that count in favor of something. now, you know what philosophers do all day. so a consideration that counts in favor of something is just like the response should have to value in the world. the turtle valuable. it's pain and suffering is just valuable. i have a reason to rescue it. this is not to blow the situation with the turtle out of proportion. but here's one of the things i believe duty and obligation are actually kind rare in our moral lives. it doesn't mean they don't happen regularly, but like you have to restrain yourselves from punching in the nose. i don't think very often right. the reasons everywhere. and so your to value in the world this softer moral situations they tell us a lot about you they tell us if you're compassionate if you're the kind of person you go out of their way to rescue a conscious being right and so they actually important in our moral lives and they're much much more common. but here's the thing we must so

many reasons because you have a reason to do something time there's a consideration that counts in favor. and so any time there's an animal risk, right, you have reasons to do it. any time you can make someone happy, you have reasons to do it. think about all the donations that you can make right now, like you can be donating various charitable organizations right now? and you'd be promoting goodness. we have reasons to do that, but also. now we're getting back to ethics. think about all of the ways you can participate in goodness and badness, all the ways in which you can participate in justice and, injustice. and i think all of that stuff gives us reasons. so here's the diagnosis. the diagnosis is walters and armstrong. another philosophers went wrong because they're like, you don't have a duty to do something if it doesn't have an a meaningful impact. and i'm sure that's actually true. you don't have a duty not to join us all. you got a really good reason not to join us all because joy goes like where you're just spewing

emissions for no reason. all is showing a lack of concern, disrespect for the environment for the people have to live in it. it's not standing in solidarity with people who are going to lose their homes, to rising tides right. it's not exhibiting all of these different properties, but we have many reasons. there's still a mess. so here's the big question. in the last third or so of the book, how in the world we organize these reasons? i can't give you the full answer. i mean one my publisher probably wouldn't like it. two yeah, it a while. right? so what i'm going to do is i'm going to give you like a snapshot of the way i've tried to start thinking about the. i think we need rules and oftentimes when we think about rules in the context morality, we're just thinking about duty or thinking about thou shalt not kill. that's a good rule. follow that one. i endorse that. right but we need non duty rules. we need rules are heuristics, right? these are rules of thumb.

they help us organize ize this very, very messy moral world that we live in. and so you're dealing with climate change and you're dealing with cobalt mining and you're dealing with all of these companies that have slave labor somewhere in their supply chain. we're dealing with all of these things constantly. we need a way start organizing our moral response. so i don't think rules are like super new to us. we go back to our dietary, right. i think one of the good reasons to be a vegetarian is, not because, you know, if you if you eat meat, you're actually hurting animals. if the puzzle's right, if understanding armstrong's right and if the animal agriculture system is as complex as i think is you actually are hurting animals when you eat meat? it's insensitive to choice, but we still have good reason to become vegetarian because here's rule, a rule that respects the value of trying to minimize your impact on the environment, on animal welfare systems and rules have this great benefit you set it and forget it. and now you never have to think

it. but because it's not a duty, maybe vegetarianism is too strict. you can be flexitarian and this is still a good organizing role. so like you know, when you have good vegetarian options and good meat options. choose vegetarian more. here's a helpful rule flexitarian. put yourself down on the pyramid a little bit pescatarian. some people are pescatarian. i think it's because they don't think fish are animals but like. sure, right. they're more less environmentally harmful. so kind of eating low on the food chain. all right. so is like one way to show the offshore of my book i want is to start thinking about rules. i'm going to give you a few tools for dealing with them. this is this looks complicated. when first look at it, i'm going to talk through it. so here's my matrix. we actually have different kinds of reasons when it comes to catastrophes. so just sticking with climate change. so here's a set of rules to help us respond to climate change. now, i'm not going to tell you

that should do all of them. i mean, precisely are going to tell you that you can't. right. so hang on. but the purity, social and structural going down along the vertical axis, right. this is calling us calling our attention different kinds of rules. and what this is that the purity response to withdraw yourself from catastrophe is only one way to address a problem like climate change. so sure you could try to not be a part of it, but you could also try to be a positive part in the solution. so you could you could then follow what i think of as reasons instead of negative ones. so social and structural reasons try to be a voice, try to be an advocate try to change policy. you're still just doing a tiny part like us politics is probably insensitive to most of our individual choices, but you can be part of the group that to make a change and that gives us reasons, too. all right. so those are the different kinds. and then going left to right, you can organize reasons based

on sort of how demanding they are or organize rules based on how demanding they are. and the reason is valuable is because it can show us rules are really easy to follow. so in the left column these are rules that face competing considerations right don't be wasteful. so my favorite because i say it to my daughter about 19 times a day. don't be wasteful. this is the easiest one to follow because it's actually good for everyone. and if you don't waste but eat low on the food chain. that's my personal sort of like food heuristic. it's actually hard because we eat a lot and. you're in different situations and etiquette calls for different and you travel and etc., etc. etc. so it's not easy and. then there are the people who want to minimize their carbon footprint. so here's what i want to draw attention to, if that's goal, you're going to spend your entire life trying to do it. it's going to take all your time, all your energy, all your moral resources. it's not to say you shouldn't do it. it means that it's making a choice and it's giving us. it's taking opportunities to do

other things that are good moral responses. right? so people who try to minimize their carbon footprint are, not paying as much attention to cobalt. they're also probably giving as much to charity because takes a lot of resources to do this. they're also probably not thinking as much about animal agriculture, aside from the environmental impacts, right? so there are a lot of different ways that we can let any of these rules take over our lives. all right. so what i'm going to do is going to point the finger rather than you. so here's matrix. and what i've done is i've used a gray scale to show how well or how i live up to the heuristics. so the darker the gray, the better live up to the rule. here's my goal. my goal is whenever i find a good, reasonable rule that faces no competing considerations adopt, it there's no reason not to write. and then if we're morally sensitive, we're clocking these reasons out the world. and so we should sort of feel steady pressure to push rightward. but whe acknowledging you

cannot do everything, you can't do everything because it always comes with tradeoffs, right so how do we decide which things to do notice the middle column is darklyut for me. that's the social column about we live with one another. it's about speaking to other people engaging with other humans. i'm a professor. i'm an i'm a public speaker. thiss a thing i can do. i like to do it. i don't think i suck at it like it's where my my interests, my abilities and my privilege. right. i had the opportunity to come to gaithersburg book festival, which is amazing, right? so you get to exploit what you have to target your respon in way that is particular to you and i do wish so notice e le least grayed out one is volunteer for the movement which is all way down in the right corner. i would love to volunteer me for, say, the climate movement, but i have a demanding job in a year old. like that's not in the cards right now. i don't.

i think i'll retire someday. you know, here's hoping social security. hang in there. and if i do, then my life will shift. i may have more time than money. right. and then. volunteering is the sort of thing that makes a lot of sense. so this is about tailoring moral responses to contexts here. some concluding lessons. i know, i didn't give you like a loctite argument. sorry. as a moral philosopher, it kind of like, hurts me deeply that i didn't give you a knock down argument. but here's what we got in 30 minutes. there is no one thing that you must do in response to catastrophe i think we should do something. we have overwhelming reason to do lots of things, but there is no one thing. and so when someone you must do x, i think they're probably wrong. but you could always more and it would be great if you did this is this is the tradeoff you don't have duties so you kind of get of obligation. but that means you can't just satisfy the obligation and be done for the day. you could always kind of push

rightward on that matrix. so that means the work is never done. and this can be really overwhelming. people find that this is a is a bit crushing. but here's my positive uplifting remember it's a rebuttal to nihilism and it's a rebuttal denialism. yeah, everything you do matters, but you to matter. isn't that awesome? that's like, way better than not mattering, right? we get to think about what we is meaningful. so moral life in the 21st century, i say, is a constant and a creative, because we constantly have to be deciding for ourselves how to make our responses fit our lifestyle our contexts are gifts. are privileges, our abilities, etc. thank you very much. that is my time. happy to take questions questions. i think a mic is coming around.

they shout at your own party. the tv people would love it if you didn't. bringing it to you. thank you so much. so this is appealing more to your professor ship, but here's just a societal note that this all speaks to as a professor you're seeing what i'm saying. we are a postmodern world. let me start that way. we're in a postmodern and postmodern postmodernity is sometimes seen as a there is capital t truth anymore. that kind of argument that can quickly devolve into nihilism. and so i'm curious with you speaking to the audience that you have of these 18 year old

students as well as in expanding on this with your book, how do you combat nihilism in a postmodern world and culture while still keeping part of your soul? thank you. yeah, that's great question. in that last part feels important so i actually have a chapter the book on relativism for exactly this reason because i teach and so i, i sort of have 20 years of data for my students on like where the temperature is what the temperature is where they're feeling. and yeah, i think right now the thing i hear most is sort of well, i mean that would be right for me. it's, it's, you know, not necessarily right for you. so who am i to say so i have a chapter and it's very short chapter to be honest. and i say, look, i think i can disprove relativism to you it's not quite this short, but it's close. so i think can disprove relativism to you.

is it wrong to light babies on fire for fun? is it wrong by babies? fire for fun? yes. boom. relativism defeated. we found objective moral truth in this room right. yeah. so it's a cheat because i only one. but it's true because i found one, right and so the goal of that chapter is to say to students, i understa in the appeal of cosmopolitanism but cosmopolitanism only doesn't imply relativism. they're incompatible because the cosmopolitan students that i have say things like, you know, who am i, right people elsewhere do it differently. and so they want be tolerant. i say, so is tolerance, universal value, because if it is is false, right? so relativism undermines cosmopolitan zionism, it undermines the draw to like

respect other people's beliefs. so here's the really uncomfortable way to put that not all beliefs should be respected if your view is that we should light babies on fire for fun. i do respect that view. i think we're all on the same page with that one, right? we all got that one right. so the reason i do that is to try to disarm people early because come back at the end and say architecture should be ethics are going to tailor a bit to you and your strengths and weaknesses which sounds like relativism but it is not because all of the moral considerations are real. it's just that the way in which we should respond to them differ. because, look, some of us in this room can put solar panels on our house, some of us, and then we probably have solar panels on house. that cannot be a requirement for everyone because it is not reasonable, not in the realm of possibility. so there are people for whom different of engaging with catastrophe are totally accessible and other people who aren't.

and that's what we have to make room for. thank you for that. that's a great question. yeah. you mentioned that you think policy is a big thing, which it is. but i in my own life that working at the local level really makes a difference do you address that in your book that you really can you talk about while volunteering and advocating but really at the local level vote can make a huge difference that is absolutely true so this is a great point. i probably don't actually do as much in the book as i should. so i have this sort of distinction between, a high level policy very often. so talking about things like climate change, right. and so what is the policy level that would mitigate absolute catastrophe? it's not only national, it's international. all right agreements across countries, but we can start and. so what you know, what we can do right is cities and states can have an actual make an actual difference. so like we should talk about maryland, but you know california is so easy because california, a state can make

decisions is one of the biggest economies in the world as a states. right it can have genuine influence. and so they're sorts of levels. so maryland is less than that when we make decisions. but way impactful than when i switch. right. so there are steps all along the way. great question. yeah. give him one second. i know. i know. the c-span guys would love it. love that. i'm really looking forward to reading your book. you quite a lot of dilemmas that thought about and i a name that i didn't hear from you today was greta thunberg and to me that's for our futures. you she's really challenging country why don't we act now and why don't we have action that has result quicker results. yeah this is great so a quick about why editors are so important. my first draft of the book did not talk about thunberg. my editor was like, what so she's in there now and and where

she shows up because it could be anywhere. but where she shows up is on that graph. one second. so we have different strengths, weaknesses. so here's the difference as. i say, here's the difference between me and greta. there are so many differences between me, but but she's young and so she has energy and time in a way that i'm going to say a lot of us don't, she probably i don't know her. so but i wouldn't say she doesn't have money the way some people do. so it be unreasonable to expect her and the, you know, melinda gates to contribute to this conversation in the same way. but also because she's young she has this ability to inspire, which i can i think can actually be a little offensive. i think young people are kind of like, hey, else stop telling us to save the world that you screwed up, but it can really shame us, right? when i look at my daughter and i'm like, this is what we're leaving you during season,

right? when i can't breathe the air. and i'm like, we did this to you. the youth not only have and energy, etc. they had this specific place in our population that can be inspiring because it's really important to call us out right in different so her as a youth feels really important and then i'll just mention there's more in the book but you also talk about bill. bill as a retiree activist. i mean, he hasn't retired climate activism, but he he launched a site called the third act. and it's for what calls mature adults in the third act of life, who have a different set of opportunities, strengths and willingness to engage in different ways. right? so yeah, we should think about the precise way in which all these people can make a dent and then out hours. right. thank you. are we done? i'm being told we're done. thank you so much.